Hunter Museum of American Art

Like most museums, the Hunter only has about 20% of our collection on view. Many of the works we keep on view are major works by important artists. But we have a lot of pieces in storage which are lovely, but are a little “quieter,” as it were. They are often works on paper – drawings or prints, for example – that are small or perhaps by artists who are not as well known. So, it is a pleasure for me to get these works out in the galleries once in a while, as we just recently did in gallery 12 in the Mansion.

Karl Buehr painted a small watercolor view of Moccasin Bend from Lookout Mountain in 1898. It looks very fresh; that is the colors are bright and it doesn’t look like it has been faded at all by the light, which can sometimes happen with watercolors. This is a rather early piece by the artist, and he later gained fame as an Impressionist painter of female figures in the garden.

Other works in the gallery show images of the country life in the mid to late nineteenth century. Several were illustrations for stories or newspaper articles. Early in his career, Winslow Homer often supplied drawings for articles in Harper’s Weekly, a well known newspaper of the day. An engraver would translate Homer’s drawings into the prints which were used for the actual printing. Although it’s not certain that G.A. Frost’s work was an illustration, it is done in a grisaille (a French word meaning “grey”) painting style that was often used for such work.

Emma Bell Miles, Chattanooga artist, naturalist and author, is represented by two watercolors of birds, a Redstart and a Ruby Throated Hummingbird. Often living in poverty, she needed to use whatever materials were at hand for her drawings. In the Hunter works, she painted on architectural blueprints, and in Redstart you can see the shape of the rooms bleeding through the image.

This is just a sampling of the 16 works in this gallery. Stop by and take a look at them in person.

Ellen Simak, Chief Curator